Consumers using existing photo editing applications typically want to improve the overall “look” of their digital images. Certain conventional image editing applications provide a myriad of controls that typically consist of a combination of sliders, curves and eye droppers. Although professional photographers know the meaning of these different controls and often have a typical workflow or approach to navigate through the controls, an average user is typically insufficiently familiar with these controls to make the best use of them. The average user is likely to touch every control until the user is somewhat satisfied with the result, but without having the certitude that he/she has applied the optimal combination of sliders and controls manipulations.
In addition, existing photo editing applications fail to provide similar visual results for the same input image at different resolutions. A user upon (a) enhancing the image to bring out the details (applying “pop”) and reducing the size of the image, or (b) reducing the size of an original image and then applying “pop,” would expect the resulting images after these two operations to look similar. This is especially important in many editing applications since a user may edit on a lower resolution (e.g., screen resolution) image, but their edits may be applied and saved for the original, high resolution image. If the same set of parameters is used for these operations, the results are often not the same in many conventional image editing applications.
Furthermore, existing photo editing applications fail to provide an efficient way to enhance the local contrast and saturation of an image while protecting skin tone or faces in the image. The amount of enhancement performed by these editing apps is often too strong for faces, which leads to undesirable and not very visually appealing results.